The Actor

Cut ...

I bring up the virtual control panel, click pause, and remove my data goggles.

Here's the scene: a desk with a keyboard. Visible are a pair of hands, mine. Also, two screens: in one Graeme Williams' face is frozen in consternation; in the other, the first draft of the account you have just read, my first and only encounter with the man in person and therefore my best guess for where this story starts.

The camera glides backward – no scrimping on production values when I'm center stage – revealing the back of my neck, the span of my shoulders and the spread of the office; the desk with its two monitors, a large window behind it, and a bookshelf along the left-hand wall. The room is small, but adequate for purpose. Cosy, I would say. The bookshelf is full of hardbound books, old novels, biographies, an atlas from another time. None of them mine and none of them new. None of them read by me.

The camera moves again, forward now, wavering slightly, suggestive of a handheld, or perhaps of a micro surveillance drone, eavesdropping on my words. The focus winds out to infinity, passing unimpeded through the picture window and out into the whole wide world, the part of it immediately visible being a wide expanse of ocean racked with swell lines and a wave-lashed coast perceptibly blurred beneath a light shimmer of spray. The house I occupy is built on a hill side, a good hour's drive from the nearest city.

What do you make of someone who refers to himself in the third person? An affectation? Or a recognition that I'm not the person I used to be? Was Oscar Wilde right in his claim: "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth"? Or is the mask just an extension of the self, another layer in need of decoding?

This is a true story in the sense that it relates events that did actually happen, that were, in many cases, recorded on camera. In all honesty, though, I can only recount these events from where I now stand, at a physical and temporal distance, and call myself by my real name, Simon Vassinger.

An acquaintance of mine, an immigrant, once told me a story about her young child. Having arrived at their new home, she enrolled her son at the local kindergarten, hoping it would help with his assimilation into their new world, reassuring herself that, for a child of that age, the world would be new wherever he was. The kid had thrived, or so it had seemed to the mother. Then, some weeks later, the child's teacher had taken her aside at the end of a session to voice a concern – that the child had a shown a tendency to refer to himself by his own name. The teacher passed this information on in the soft and diligent tones of a professional carer. This was at the height of the autism epidemic and eyes were quite rightly peeled for signs of deviancy among the sons and daughters of the intelligencia. Anything that suggested a confused perception of self versus not-self was particularly suspect.

The case proved a false alarm. Truth was, the family were native speakers of an Asian language in which the convention was to use names instead of pronouns in conversation. The kid had simply carried the practice over to his incipient acquisition of the English language. He grew out of it soon enough.

Well I'm just like that kid – thrust into a world not of my choosing, I'm clinging to my own natural idiom. I suffer from no confusion as to where my own self ends, but I'm an actor, not a writer: when I go on stage I go masked – in character, not as Simon Vassinger. And if from time to time the situation demands Simon Vassinger as played by Simon Vassinger, well I'm nothing if not versatile.

This isn't my story – it is a story of what happened, in which I happened to participate. I have been tasked by my employers with writing a report; to explain to them how it was that everything went so badly wrong. That report is largely written – it didn't take long. But the wheels of justice turn slowly and the court case will not start for some time yet. With time on my hands (suspended on full pay), I feel an obligation to also record the truth of the matter. Perhaps there will come a time when people will want to know. And if this is what I am to do then it makes sense to do it from the outside looking in – because that is exactly what I am doing. They have granted me full access to the surveillance video archive, audio tracks too, in some cases; but I must lip-read the emotions. Which brings me back to my point, worth reiterating – that the two Simon Vassingers, actor and acted, are not the same. Time is a measure of change, and just as years can pass in the blink of an eye, great change can be crammed into the few short months traversed by this time machine of mine. I can at best only guess at who I was back then.

So, let's get on with the show.